Plasma windtunnel
This is a close-up view of a shooting star produced in a plasma windtunnel. These facilities are used to simulate the extreme conditions during the entry of spacecraft into the atmosphere. In this case the test object placed in the hot plasma flow was a piece of a meteorite that melted and evaporated within seconds - exactly like the falling stars in the sky.
—Martin Eberhart, High Enthalpy Flow Diagnostics Group, Institute of Space Systems, Stuttgart, Germany